A friend with an interest in Habsburg and East Central European matters
brought this to my attention.
Jim
https://www.eurozine.com/chernovtsy-palimpsest/?fbclid=IwAR29kHjDpDeW_doFUIuqhyRxRwJrag9w2Kc6jkN7TeJ7hNxkRU3O28s5_QE#
Chernovtsy palimpsest
* Igor Pomerantsev <
https://www.eurozine.com/authors/pomerantsev-igor/>
18 May 2022
The many names of Chernovtsy in Ukraine attest to the tumultuous
military and political history of Europe, borne out in cultural and
linguistic competition, conflict and compromise in literature, music and
art. What traces of this past can still be seen in the city today?
Open any encyclopaedia article about Chernovtsy, and one of the first
things you’ll encounter is a list of the city’s names in half a dozen
different languages: German, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian,
Polish, Hungarian. This bears witness to the tumultuous military and
political history of Europe, borne out in cultural and linguistic
competition, conflict and compromise in literature, music and art. Each
new set of authorities took pains to erase, to efface the previous
version of the city’s history and culture. The Czernowitz-born poet Rose
Ausländer, a classic of twentieth-century Austro-German literature, once
compared the city to a mirror carp in pepper aspic, silent in five
languages.
Tombstones at the Jewish cemetery of Chernovtsy. Photo by Julian Nyča
viaWikimedia Commons
<
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chernivtsi_Jewish_Cemetery_03.JPG>
It is a striking image. I was lucky: I grew up in Chernovtsy and heard
the voice of the carp. As a six year old, with my mother at the central
market, I heard these extraordinary conversations in a mixture of
Yiddish and the Hutzul dialect. Jewish ladies haggled with Hutzul
peasant women. They understood each other perfectly.
The wireless opened up the Romanian world to me in childhood, because
Romanian radio could be heard clearly in Chernovtsy. I lived on
Lermontov Street (now Kokhanovsky) and can remember what a huge event it
was when our neighbours were visited by their Romanian relatives. Among
them was an enchanting little girl, Marina from Bucharest. She wore a
pink chiffon dress, something none of us had ever seen before. Just one
meridian westward, but this one meridian still made itself felt in
everything, including a little girl’s dress.
As a schoolboy I was aware of the prison palimpsest, though I didn’t
know that word. I mean prison not in an abstract but a literal sense. In
my day the square where it was located, next to a secondary school, was
called Sovietskaya; now it’s Sobornaya. At one time it was Kriminalnaya
and at another Avstria-platz. What strata of doggerel, curses,
obscenities and oaths were layered on the walls of the cells of that
prison, built in the first third of the nineteenth century! A polyglot
palimpsest, as befits Chernovtsy.
<
https://www.patreon.com/Eurozine>
In my teens, I adored cinema and worked as a poster artist’s assistant.
Truly, of all the artists in the world I loved the inspired daubers of
our provincial cinemas best: they, the daubers, had their own hierarchy,
their lucky apprentices. Today this craft, this guild, is extinct: print
has displaced the freshly coloured poster. And yet here was a genre that
knew its own Giottos, its own Chagalls. This was a poster palimpsest.
When I became a student, I discovered life’s meaning in poetry, in
literature. Maybe the city had bewitched me, spoken to me in a literal
sense. My city has the reputation of being a cultural crossroads.
Between the two world wars, its inhabitants included writers who were
later recognised as some of the most significant figures of German
literature of the second half of the twentieth century. Gifted
scientists, musicians, engineers were born and lived here. Why, how did
it become such a confluence of cultures; why was it here that German,
Jewish, Romanian, Ukrainian poetry peered at, hearkened to each other?
It was Tomsk that helped me unlock the secret of Chernovtsy. Twenty-five
years ago, the radio station that employed me at the time sent me on a
trip to Siberia, and I set foot in Tomsk for the first time. I liked the
city very much. Local historians told me the city owed its architecture
to the Poles, among them political exiles. Former inmates of the Gulag,
not least my fellow-citizens from Chernovtsy, made a major contribution
to the city’s schools, science and music. During the Brezhnev years of
stagnation the city had been semi-closed, and Tomsk’s Jews were long
denied exit visas, which meant they had, willy-nilly, been forced to
maintain high academic and cultural standards.
But what does this have to do with Chernovtsy, and what is this secret I
am talking about? Why here? What is the source of this magical
chemistry? I think I have the answer. I know who these chemists were.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was shaken by
a democratic revolution, which ended in its dissolution in 1918.
Repression followed: shootings, arrests, officers reduced to the ranks.
Ernst Neubauer, a young revolutionary who had been a journalist for
the/Wiener Zeitung/, was fortunate: he was exiled to the eastern
frontier of the Empire, to Chernovtsy.
Ernst Neubauer, c. 1880. Image viaWikimedia Commons
<
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ernst_Rudolf_Neubauer.JPG>
At that time, the brilliant Viennese intellectual and his companions
would have felt Bukovina was something like Kolyma. Neubauer was not
stripped of his civil rights there. He taught literature and history at
the Gymnasium. His pupils included the poet Mihai Eminescu, who was to
become a classic of Romanian verse, and Karl Emil Frantzos, a popular
German-speaking Jewish author and essayist. The Ukrainian writer and
folklorist Yury Fedkovich came under Neubauer’s influence, and would
subsequently dedicate a book of German-language poems written to him.
Neubauer started a German-language newspaper,/Bukowina/, with a Sunday
supplement in which he published local writers and poets. He wrote books
and was the heart and soul of a number of cultural unions.
In the autumn of 2021, I spent a month in Vienna. I wrote poems and
essays, wandered through the city, listened to the music of the
buildings, stables and palaces, gazed at the paintings of Schiele,
Modigliani and Titian, chatted with Viennese colleagues. If I ever
brought up Neubauer’s name in discussions with these colleagues, they
looked at me blankly. He has been forgotten in Chernovtsy, too. The
humus of culture has a life of its own, though probably one best left to
specialists in soil fertility.
I left Chernovtsy a long time ago, though I go back every year in
September for the Meridian Czernowitz poetry festival. The festival has
its own talisman, its shibboleth, Paul Celan – born 1920 in Czernowitz,
died 1970 in Paris. What I like in Celan’s poetry are the pauses and
caesuras. His syntax. He experienced the deaths of his mother and father
in a Romanian camp, and was himself incarcerated. That, I believe, is
when his heart stopped. For Celan, the caesuras and pauses between
words, between grammatical constructions, are not an avant-garde
affectation; they are the pauses between heart beats. Another reason why
I am grateful to Celan: he was an invisible poet, a ghost poet.
Ramshackle Vitebsk is all Chagall. Every step in Dublin brings you up
against Joyce. You never hear laboured breathing in Celan, not even in
his most tragic poems. He left no baggage behind him in Chernovtsy
(Czernowitz), no heavy furniture, no patches of sweat or bloodstains.
Paul Celan, Jewish Romanian-born German-language poet, Holocaust
survivor, Czernowitz, 1941. Photo via Wikimedia Commons
<
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PaulCelan.jpg>
The phrase ‘to swallow your tongue’ exists in many languages. It can
sometimes be taken almost literally. During the war, it seems Paul Celan
swallowed his tongue, from horror, despair, helplessness: he had lost
everyone and everything. And later in his poetry he is looking for his
swallowed tongue, to let it take its proper place in the cavity of his
mouth. This search is the meaning of his poetry. To this day Celan’s
quiet voice can be heard distinctly in the acoustic palimpsest of
Chernovtsy.
Published 18 May 2022
Original in Russian
Translated by Frank Williams
First published by Eurozine (English version)
Contributed by Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) © Igor Pomerantsev /
Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) / Eurozine
PDF/PRINT <
https://www.eurozine.com/chernovtsy-palimpsest/?pdf>
*******************************************************************************
This moderated discussion group is for information exchange on the subject of
Czernowitz and Sadagora Jewish History and Genealogy. The opinions expressed
in these posts are the opinions of the original poster only and not necessarily
the opinions of the List Owner, the Webmaster or any other members
or entities connected with this mailing list. The Czernowitz-L list has
an associated web site at
http://czernowitz.ehpes.com that includes a
searchable archive of all messages posted to this list. Beginning in 2021,
archived messages can be found at:
https://www.mail-archive.com/czernowitz-l_at_list.cornell.edu/
To send mail to the list, address it to <Czernowitz-L_at_cornell.edu>.
To remove your address from this e-list follow the directions at
https://it.cornell.edu/lyris/leave-e-lists-lyris
To receive assistance for this e-list send an e-mail message to:
owner-Czernowitz-L_at_list.cornell.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on 2022-05-25 19:56:11
